14a. Curiosity Stoppers, Fake Explanations, and the Need to Upset Inner Consistency

“Fake explanations don’t feel fake. That’s what makes them dangerous.”

[Previously]

This newsletter continues from where we left off in our examination of the names of the birds by looking at answer words and some killer question-killer answers from an “earlier age” of science. (Or, watch Writer-Type wander deeper into the weeds.)

Listeners and Their Answers

Feynman and Gordon’s claim that an answer word might not answer connects with Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination when he says, “no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment that is often difficult to penetrate.”

At first glance, such a view seems unnecessarily complex. Naming seems much simpler in contrast. Clear. To the point. People like that shit. Yet Bakhtin says language used for naming only “take[s] the listener for a person who passively understands but not for one who actively answers and reacts.”

Paulo Freire shows how such thinking infects many teaching environments. In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire talks about what he calls the “banking concept” of education where teachers are depositors of information and students are often seen as empty containers that need only to be filled with the teacher’s knowledge. Little more is required of students than to memorize: “Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Pará is Belém.” Adams, sounding quite Freire-like says, “culture trains mental playfulness, fantasy, and reflectiveness out of people by placing more stress on the value of channeled mental activity.” Order and clarity take precedence over complexity, ambiguity, and nuance and as a result, Freire says, words lose their “transforming power.” Words and their environments become rigid rather than elastic. What you end up with, says Freire, is no back-and-forth, no dialogue, not communication but rather, one-way “communiqués.” Students then become accustomed to receiving such bank-deposit pronouncements no questions asked.

“What’s wrong with those answers?” you might ask. “That noise, in fact, was thunder! For your information, the capital of Pará is Belém!”

True. Lost in those answers, however, is significance and association: “What Belém means for Pará and what Pará means for Brazil,” says Freire. There is little room for gray area thinking with this model. Adams shows the potential fallout from thinking that relies on naming without the elasticity of association and significance:

To be convinced that all people who own guns are wrong, that abortion should be outlawed, that government should be abolished, or that the free market can solve all social problems pretty much guarantees that one will not contribute much creativity to problems having to do with guns, unwanted pregnancies, national organization, or social welfare.

Instead, people holding such stances attempt to solve complex problems with question-killers. (Government waste! Free speech! Entitlements! Wokeism!) Pronouncements serve as stand-ins for inquiry. From a young age, we become conditioned to accepting all kinds of question-killer, non-answer responses as adequate. The result of this banking concept/exam model of education, Adams says, is that “We tend to stay within our habits with an accompanying loss of creativity.”

The Answer, My Friend, Is “Phlogiston”

Gordon says this learned complacency has profound implications: “When we live with the familiar system without questioning it, we lose our awareness of the unfounded assumptions which underlie the system and our acceptance of it.” Not too long ago, for instance, that funny noise and occasional accompanying lightning strike was thought to be evidence of the wrath of God. If lightning struck your cathedral, which apparently was not all that uncommon, clearly it was because of some shenanigans among the faithful. I mean, what else? As Natalie Angier points out, it didn’t occur to anyone that the frequency of cathedral lightning strikes might have been related to the often preposterous height of their spires combined with a tendency to build cathedrals atop the highest possible vantage points. Then along came Ben Franklin with his lightning rods, and, coincidentally, God suddenly lightened up.

Uncritical acceptance of passed-down wisdom didn’t stop with lightning. Earlier scientific explanations for combustion provide an example. According to Eliezer Yudkowsky, for a long time if you asked questions on the nature of fire you always got the same answer. “What is the orangey-bright ‘fire’ stuff? Why does the wood transform into ash? To both questions, the 18^th-century chemists answered ‘phlogiston.’” Yudkowsky explains phlogiston theory this way:

Phlogiston escaped from visible substances as visible fire. As the phlogiston escaped, the burning substances lost phlogiston and so became ash, the ‘true material’. Flames in enclosed containers went out because the air became saturated with phlogiston, and so could not hold any more. Charcoal left little residue upon burning because it was nearly pure phlogiston.

Well, I guess that settles it, then!

Fact-free reasoning of this sort was accepted without question. For instance, If you wanted to know what animated and led to the evolution of living things, the answer was élan vital [life force]. Yudkowsky says such an answer “functioned primarily as a curiosity stopper. You asked, ‘Why’ and the answer was “Elan vital!’” Yudkowsky adds,

This was an earlier age of science. For a long time, no one realized there was a problem. Fake explanations don’t feel fake. That’s what makes them dangerous.

With such answers, he says, “Your curiosity has been sated but it has not been fed.” Phlogiston was a self-consistent system of explanations that didn’t allow for questioning its own axioms. It was untouchable, and it was definitely going to be on the exam.

Jonathan Swift lampooned this train of thought in Gulliver’s Travels when the great scholars of Brobdingnag examined Gulliver and, marveling at his diminutive stature, speculated that Gulliver must be a watch mechanism or maybe even an embryo since he was much too small to be someone with dwarfism. His state couldn’t be explained through any natural phenomenon in their world, so the scholars conferred to come up with a hypothesis.

After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally lusus naturae [freak of nature]; a determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe, whose professors, disdaining the old evasion of occult causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise their ignorance, have invented this wonderful solution of all difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge.

Phlogiston theory was widely accepted during Swift’s era, so his critique was ahead of its time. Eventually, science would experience what Lakoff and Johnson call a “cultural shift,” complete with new metaphors.

The age of “[t]his wonderful solution of all difficulties” was coming to an end, replaced by a developing toleration of ambiguity. New figurative language led the way, replacing old metaphorical concepts that limited thought and inquiry and established imaginary boundaries. As we saw earlier, Lewis Thomas had a breakthrough when he said the Earth is like a cell. Previous paradigm shifts occurred when Einstein called spacetime a fabric, when Newton compared an apple to the Moon, and when Darwin used a tree to illustrate the origin of species. Such an “elastic environment” restores language’s “transforming power.”

Adaptable, Manageable Beings

According to Gordon, even well-established, proven answers must be challenged. The best way to break free of self-consistent systems, says Gordon, is by using “play” as a device for “upsetting or distorting inner consistency.” The second group of can opener designers comes to mind, the ones who played with the word open.

Gordon says that when Nikolai Lobachevsky played with Euclidean geometry and the parallel postulate, he upset the inner consistency of the system. This connects with what Richard Feynman proposed when he talked about doing more than naming the birds. One way to see what this bird is doing is by behaving like the second group of can opener designers when they questioned the meaning of “open.” This encourages what Gordon calls “speculative play with logical systems” and can become a source for innovation. Gordon claims Lobachevsky’s question made “the familiar strange” (parallel lines that diverge from each other) and as a result opened up important new ways of thinking that otherwise would not have been possible, thus leading to the invention of a new system.

Gordon says play with language and with conceptual systems serves to shake us from “view[s] too close to the present can opener art.” He adds,

Making the familiar strange and sustaining that strangeness requires a constant vigilance to reawaken the evocative quality of comparison relationships. It involves achieving new ways of asking old questions.

There we go with comparative relationships again! For sure, Lobachevsky would have been in that second can opener group with its clams and pea pods as well as in the trees-like-broccoli camp.

Ready answers and given knowledge are popular, though, because they sure can come in handy. They save time. Yet they are incomplete explanations at best and too often lead into the more dangerous territory of unquestioned assumptions and even to Yudkowsky’s phlogiston-like “fake explanations.”

Answering “thunder” to the question “What’s that funny noise?” is a non-answer, a curiosity stopper. It’s the name of the bird, not what the bird is doing. If we become beholden to such answers or become trapped in self-consistent systems, we become Freire’s “adaptable, manageable beings.”

Speaking of, here’s an example. We’ve talked about spots and dots a lot, now let’s look at lines.

https://psychologyfanatic.com/asch-conformity-study/

Some of that Freire-like adaptable, manageable beings business shows up in a psychology study known as the Asch Conformity Experiment where people in groups were asked, as Adams phrases it, “which of three lines of different lengths was equal in length to the fourth line.” Each group had only one real member and all the others were shills instructed to guess wrong. Thirty-three percent of the real subjects, says Adams, "changed their initial correct judgment to agree with that of the ‘shills,’ even though the difference in line length was clearly discernible,” thus demonstrating how people can become conditioned to accept “common judgment” and “majority opinions” even when they are highly suspect.

There is an awful lot of this going around these days.

If your judgment of line length is compromised because of the influence of others (who, incidentally, are lying to your face), just imagine what you would be up against with ideas like phlogiston or élan vital. Who would dare to question the wisdom of the age? I mean, who do you think you are? Consequently, we bow to what is presented to us as given knowledge.

We have a history of doing this with writing instruction, too. Often there has been a debate model mentality lurking behind the typical English essay. This places a heavy emphasis on argument. In a debate, your goal is to present your argument convincingly enough to win, so you aim to win at all costs. There’s not much space for play or elasticity or for “upsetting or distorting inner consistency” of your position or for pushing the boundaries of your topic, which means you’re leaving out one of writing’s essential characteristics—its tendency, if you’re listening, to complicate the issue.

But such complexities get in the way of your winning argument. Best leave them out. Otherwise, things could get messy. Writing isn’t allowed to be messy. And God forbid you risk being unclear.

To be continued . . .

Notes

In 14b, we will consider an example of teacher’s block and the case of a writing student who has learned too well.